A photo of a bloody washcloth at the Super 8 Estes Park, posted by a reviewer. It had been cleaned and then hung in the room to be reused.

“I don’t know how to address the article,” Chung says. “Some of the comments are older ones; some of these issues are older ones. Some of these things are things that have already been taken care of. I don’t think it’s fair that they are part of this now.”

On the site, the most recent comments were from guests who called it a “dismal dump” in October, guests in September who noted that the “ceiling plaster in the bathroom was…disgusting with old water stains” and a visit from August that said the bathtub “had black mold growing around the base.”

Older posts going back through the rest of the summer were pretty revealing: dirty washcloths, bathroom floors that obviously hadn’t been cleaned for some time, several references to mold and bad electrical outlets. “I would have rather slept in my car,” posted contributor “annur4u” on Aug. 9.

Chung says that not only has she been deluged with phone calls from the media, but she’s also heard from several companies promising to clean up her rating on TripAdvisor and make this nightmare disappear.

“One company told me that for $500, they could make the bad reviews go away,” she says. She didn’t get the company’s name, but she says she told them, “No, thanks.”

Brooke Ferencsik, director of communications for TripAdvisor, says it’s not the first time he has heard of these predatory companies, but there’s no such way to change a review or “fix” the situation other than addressing the problems and making things right with guests.

“The only way hoteliers can improve their rating is to improve their properties and provide a better service to the travelers,” Ferencsik says. “We track all of this stuff – the reviews, the comments. We take this really seriously, and there are checks in place, very sophisticated tools to make sure that there is no way for anyone to do anything to tamper with the site. Our credibility is on the line here.”

Ferencsik adds that with a place like the Super 8 in Estes Park, there are plenty of photos and other documentation. “Certainly the reviews tell the story,” he says. “There are pages and pages of this. It’s clearly in terrible disrepair, and 92 percent of the reviewers of the Super 8 would not recommend staying there. That’s quite a high percentage.”

Ferencsik has had some experience with the dirtiest hotels over his career at TripAdvisor – he’s twice personally visited the Hotel Carter in New York, famously the dirtiest of the Dirtiest Hotels, which has been on the list five times in six years.

“That was really bad,” Ferencsik says. “There were blood stains on the mattress, a faucet knob came off in someone’s hand. Weird stuff happens there. They found bodies in the early ‘80s.”

Why doesn’t the Hotel Carter clean up its act? No one from the Carter returned my call, but my guess is that the location is what keeps the place going – it’s right on Times Square, it’s cheap, and from the outside it looks perfectly fine. And if you haven’t had the time to check online, you think this is a reasonable place to say.

But here’s a shameless plug from Ferencsik:

“That’s a great example of why TripAdvisor is so valuable,” he says. “If I’m looking around, and I’m not from New York, and this place is $100 a night, I’m saying, ‘Wow, what a deal,’ right? And then I go to the hotel’s website, and it looks like a perfectly fine property.

Ferencsik says that when hotels ask TripAdvisor what to do, the answer is easy. “Read the reviews, and then fix the problems,” he says. “And tell guests you’re sorry, and thank them for their feedback. That’s what people want to hear. Travelers want to see that management cares and is responsive.”

“At least the good thing is that Estes Park is a summer resort, and this time of year is really dead,” Chung says. “So not many people come during the winter months, and we can fix things now, before it gets busy again.”

“This was a shock for us, and we recognize that we need to do something,” Chung says. “We are going to make a list of the things they have commented on and we will remedy it.”

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Travel and OutWest editor Kyle Wagner grew up in Pittsburgh and lived in Lake County, Ill., and Naples, Fla., before moving to Denver in 1993, where she reviewed restaurants for Westword before moving to The Denver Post in 2002. She considers the best days to be those that involve her teenage daughters and doing something outside, preferably mountain biking or whitewater rafting.

Dean Krakel is a photo editor (primarily sports) at The Denver Post. A native of Wyoming, he has authored three books, "Season of the Elk," "Downriver" and "Krakel's West." An avid kayaker, rafter, mountain biker, trail runner, telemark skier and backpacker, Dean's outdoor adventures have taken him around the world.

Douglas Brown was raised about 30 miles west of Philadelphia in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where he spent a lot of time running around in the woods and fields (where he hunted and explored), and in the ocean (where he surfed and stared at the horizon). Now he lives in Boulder and spends as much time hiking, running, skiing and boarding the High Country (and the Boulder foothills) as possible.

Ricardo Baca is the entertainment editor and pop music critic at The Denver Post, as well as the founder and executive editor of Reverb and the co-founder of The UMS. Happy days often involve at least one of these: whitewater rafting, snowshoeing, vintage Vespas, writing, camping, live music, road trips, snowboarding or four-wheeling.